GA 052 | The New Approach to Lean with Mark Rosenthal

You're listening to episode 52 with Mark Rosenthal.

Welcome to the Gemba Academy Podcast, the show that's focused on helping individuals and companies achieve breakthrough results using the same continuous improvement principles leveraged by companies such as Toyota Del Monte and the U.S. department of Defense. And now, here's your host, Ron Pereira.

Hey there. This is Ron Pereira with Gemba Academy and I'd like to welcome you to another edition of the Gemba Academy podcast. As always, thank you, thank you. Thank you for taking time out of your day and your week to listen to the show and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over@gemba academy.com now today I'm excited to welcome Mark Rosenthal to the show. Now, Mark is a long time Lean thinker who actually blogs over@theleanthinker.com I was first introduced to Mark through our mutual friend and acquaintance, John Miller. And so Mark has a really deep Lean thinking background. He worked at Boeing and Kodak over the years and he's currently a consultant. And today on the show, what Mark and I talk about is sort of a transition that he's seeing. And honestly, I've seen it as well where, you know, kind of the traditional Kaizen event approach to Lean is kind of transforming itself into more of a developed leaders and have everyone kind of practicing continuous improvement on a daily basis, not just an event driven basis. So that's what Mark and I talk about. Show notes for this episode can be found over@gemba podcast.com 52 and that's 52452 so gembapodcast.com 52 okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Mark, well, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to visit with us. Where are you calling in from today?

Everett, Washington.

Everett, Washington. So are you. Is it blue sky out right now or gray and cloudy?

Be honest. Just north of Seattle. So that should answer the question.

Yeah, I tell you, it's probably the most beautiful part of this country, but I just wish there was more sunlight, that's all.

Well, the best kept secret is August is beautiful.

Yeah. Okay. All right, well, I'll try to make it out there, so. All right, Mark, well, why don't we just start by you sharing a little bit about your background and maybe how you first got exposed to all this Lean thinking stuff.

Oh, gosh, it goes back a long time, I guess formally when I was working for Boeing. I got my job there as an industrial engineer after serving in the Army. So they were on their third or fourth round of flavor of the month and during that time when they settled in on lean workshops and then Shinjujitsu, so that's really where the formal start got there.

Good. How long were you with Boeing?

About 10 years. Okay.

Yeah, Very good. All right, well, Mark, we like to start all of our shows with our guests sharing a quotation that inspires them. So I'm curious, do you have one like off the top of your head? Sounds like you weren't quite.

No, I wasn't ready for that. Yeah, nothing popped into my head right away, but I'm not. I'll probably come up with something later.

Okay. All right, well, we'll come back to it. All right. So what we're going to talk about today, Mark, is you and I were talking offline just about the role of the so called lean implementer. And that might be an internal or perhaps an external consultant or something like that. In your opinion, this whole kind of approach to practicing lean is shifting a little bit and from kind of the traditional event driven approach to, to more of a leadership development approach. So let's just start with at a high level, what are you seeing out there?

What I'm seeing is the traditional role of the, I'll say the lean practitioner, whether he's internal or external or she has been to plan and lead Kaizen events. And so they'll identify an area, they'll see opportunity, they'll grasp the current condition, they'll plan the improvements, they'll put the team together and then they'll go in and they will conduct the training and do this week long blitz of implement all their ideas. And then Monday morning after this great report out on Friday, the lean implementer moves on to the next area. And I think we all know that the rate of sustaining those changes is pretty poor. So what's shifting is that now we're beginning to say, no, it's not our job, it's the supervisor's job, it's that first line of management's job to do these improvements and to lead them. So we're shifting to coaching them how to do it and we're shifting to a process that does a little bit every day rather than tries to butch everything all at once.

So, okay, the first kind of follow up question I have to that is the, the event driven approach, where do you think that came from and why, why has it been so rampant over the years?

I think it came from again, some of the very early days where you would have Toyota managers that would get together to practice Kaizen so they would do one of these Woods's but it was more for their education. At the same time, if you look at within Toyota, their system of training prospective team leaders looks very similar but it's there to educate them on how it is, how to do improvements rather than focused on the results that they're trying to get. Yes, they have to get the results but it's not about making a conversion, it's about transferring the skill. So it's about how to get reps and how to practice doing improvements. I think a lot of American or Western consultants saw that and saw the, saw the great results they were getting and said I want some of that and brought the method over without the purpose. That's my speculation.

I've always, it's also, I mean, you know, I've got a lot of friends that are consultants and you know, John Miller is our friend. You know, that's how these guys have made their livings. But, and I, I wonder if it's been convenient also that it's easy for a consultant. Not easy but you know, swoop in for three or four days and, and the fact of the matter is they can get results quickly.

Right.

And so management teams like that and say come back and give me more of that. Sure. Give me another, you know, two grand a day or whatever it is, I'll be back.

You know, that's true. It does. You know, being one of those guys that, that five day event is very conducive to batching improvement. Yeah. Which is really what we're doing, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. So, all right, so the shift is happening. So I mean, I mean let's get deeper. Why is it happening? Where is it coming from?

I think we're learning. So the first place that started to emerge was Steve Spears research back in 99 where he identified the so called rules in use that kind of started to crack into. It's not just about the tools, not about the laundry list of lean attributes. And then he did a follow on in I think 03 called learning to Lead at Toyota, which was a really great expose on how they trained a factory leader and it was about how to coach. So they're teaching the leader how to be the coach. And then of course we have Mike Rother publishing Toyota kata back in 2009 or 10. That just blew the whole thing wide open.

Yeah.

And that's really started a bit of a movement now.

Yeah. And I've read a lot of your writing over the last year or so and I know you're very drawn to the whole Toyota Cottage. Talk about that a little bit. What is it about that that you like so much?

What I, When I read the book, what I saw was, oh, my gosh, this is like he's now explaining what I've been doing and why it was working. Because we had this experience back at Kodak where we made this transition back in like 03. But reading the book, what I got out of it was it pushed me personally backwards to conscious competence so that I could become aware of what I was saying and what was going on with people. So that gave me a structure also to pull the curtain back and say, hey, guys, this is what I'm doing to you.

Yeah.

And gave me a structure to ask more predictable questions because here's the card. I'm going to ask these questions. So it helps, helps them learn the thought process. So I really like that piece of it.

Yeah, yeah. So when did you first see the need to kind of change your approach as a consultant?

Well, this goes back to when I was a lean director at Kodak. There were about five of us and we were having the same experience doing all this event driven stuff and it wasn't working or it wasn't sticking very well. It's typical spectacular results during the week. And we were sitting around in a meeting blaming management for not being committed. And as we were talking about it, we were trying to think, what are we going to do? You know, what are we going to change? And what had occurred to us as we were talking is that each of us had one area in the company where we were personally engaging. And oh, by the way, it was working. So what were we doing differently?

Who was us? Who were you sitting with?

I was sitting with a guy named Paul Carey, with Dave Schoerman, with like.

What were their roles? What were their roles?

We were the Kos directors. So each of us is pretty high up in the management chain. Each of us worked for the VP in charge of a major division of the company. And so each of us had about a billion. Billion and a half dollar sales portfolio across about 16 time zones.

So you were like a business leader or you were continuous improvement guy.

Continuous improvement guy. So they hired us to help them make the change. I see. In the traditional way. Because they were doing events like everybody else.

Okay, so you came in, you. I guess you started running events yourself, Right.

Or leading events or teaching others to run events.

And then you're sitting around saying, why isn't this stuff sticking? Yeah, management's fault. Right, right. That Was really easy first hypothesis. So, okay, talk about then, how did you get it? Like, what was the aha moment?

The aha moment was we looked at where it was working and what we were doing that was different than what we were teaching our people to do. And what we came down to was that the areas where we were engaging personally were areas that had no infrastructure for running events themselves. They didn't run events, they ran the fewest events. And that's where we had the best results. Okay, so what do we do? Well, what we all did was we would go down and when we had time, we would coach the leaders, we'd go out to the shop floor, we would. We would look at the flow of the process and we would work with them to improve it. We would put infrastructure, help them put infrastructure into place for daily problem solving. That was different than what we were teaching our people.

So it sounds like, I'm sure you're familiar with Paul Akers, right out there in Bellingham with his FastCap crew. So where they're kind of really focused on this kind of idea of making a small improvement every day. That's kind of what you were. That's what you were kind of transitioning to.

It sounds like it is, but it was out of necessity. We didn't have an infrastructure to do the big blitzes there.

Yeah, but that was more successful. So it sounds like it was more of an accident than anything.

It was. But we really dissected and looked at what we had in common in our background was each of us had been taught by people who were in turn taught by Ono. So we recognized that we had a common DNA, even if we had never worked together before.

Fantastic. Fantastic. So obviously it worked there, Right? Where else has it worked for you?

So in my client base, where the leader has said, I want to make this shift in the way we lead, it works spectacularly. So that's really the difference when people come in and they just said, okay, we want to do kata, please train us. But they still delegate it to the practitioners. It's really frustrating because they still have this mindset that the higher level leadership doesn't participate very much. Their level of support is to allow it to happen. So there's still that leader commitment piece, but we got a different lever to get in there. Now it's not just about the results, it's about and changing the way your people behave.

So has there been a situation where this kind of approach hasn't worked well?

Yeah. I got a post called A Tale of Two Plants I put up about a month and a half ago that kind of describes that and it really highlights the difference. Where you have the central continuous improvement office spending their time creating templates and forms and audit checklists. And Toyota Kata just happens to be one more thing on the list where it's implemented as another tool. Like you have to have standard work and you have to have the improvement board has it look like this. And like this, you have to have Jadoka and now you have to have Toyota Kata. That doesn't go over very well. It's hard to make that stick.

Yeah. So Mark, someone's listening to this episode right now and they're sitting back saying, golly, he's talking about me and my organization. We run events and we're struggling, you know, and again the, the event is successful and maybe it holds together for a couple two weeks, three weeks, a month, two months. But then it, you know, entropy takes over and pulls it all back apart.

Yeah.

What advice do you have for that person? Like what, what can they do? I mean, aside from hiring you obviously.

But that'd be nice.

Yeah.

As you do the event, rather than create a long laundry list of to do's, the classic Kaizen newspaper, be really clear the problem you're solving and be really clear that the job is to get the supervisor especially that's the pivot guy, that's where things really happen. To see it himself. And at the same time you have to start asking, okay, what, when this starts to deteriorate, what are you going to see and how are you going to detect it? And start immediately to think in terms of the daily management system and get PDCA built into the daily, the daily process, not just during the, during the week.

Yes, yes. No, it's beautiful. I just remember back when I worked in industry, you know, we company, I worked with big cell phone company and you know, we had a big 5s initiative. You know, everyone was into it. My wife worked in HR at the same company and they were into it and all the rest of it, it was fan, we had posters hanging on the wall and things all over the place and it was beautiful and audit teams and this and that. But you know, obviously as you can guess it, it flopped. Right. And, and, and I, I, I, I've often wondered like, why did it happen? Why did it flop? And then I realized we had no reason why we were doing it. There was no purpose, you know. And you know, I think if we would have had that purpose and understood why it was good and because 5s is good. Right. But when it's done correctly and with the right purpose, and that's probably the biggest mistake that I see is people don't know why they're even doing these things.

5S is a classic example. 5s is a countermeasure.

Yeah.

What's the problem? And the problem is not. Well, it takes a long time to find stuff. Therefore, we have to fix all that. What stopped you today from executing the process the way you wanted to do it? Well, now make that one change. And, you know, I've seen some of the. One of the best factories I've ever seen. It would maybe score a two or maybe two and a half on a 5s audit, but the stuff that was important was absolutely where it needed to be.

Yep, yep. Brilliant. All right, Mark, you alluded to your blog. We'll talk about it at the end, at the episode as well. But give us a quick, quick plug about your blog. The theleanthinker.com Correct.

Is the URL. That's it. That's the URL. Theleanthinker.com and essentially, I write it. Mostly for me, honestly, it's when I have an idea and I really want to sort it out, I'll write about it, and that'll force me to think and think it through a little bit.

Yeah, yeah. You've been writing for a long time, too, right?

I mean, gosh, yeah. I started it, I think, back in 06 or 07. I have to go back and look.

Yeah.

And in a lot of that early stuff, I was working in China a lot, so there was a lot of reflection on my experience over there.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, speaking of reflection, what we're going to do now, Mark, is we are going to transition into. We used to call it the quick fire section, and John Miller said, you know, why are you calling it quick Fire? It's not Quick Fire. It's more of reflection. So. So I'm renaming it in honor of John. Reflection section.

Okay, that's cool.

And so the first question is, you know, as, you know, we. We lean thinkers, spend a lot of time talking about the, you know, the importance of continuous improvement, but also respect for people, and you got to have them both. And so respect for people, though, unfortunately, can be kind of be hard to put our fingers on, like, what it is and what it looks like. So what does respect for people mean to you?

You know, I'm going to go back to. We were talking briefly about David Marquet, and he says we make great people. We happen to drive A nuclear submarine.

There's your quote. Right?

There it is. Yeah. Boom. There it is. Okay. And that's really what it's about. We're about developing their capability. And Kaizen is a vehicle to develop people. It's a vehicle to get people to think in terms of cause and effect in a different way. And so the other piece is, if you go to Michel Ballet, you know, respect doesn't mean nice. Nice.

Yeah.

It means being truthful and being clear on what it is we need to get done rather than hinting at it. So one of the things that Toyota Kata brings in is here's the challenge and how you get there. We are absolutely going to negotiate, but this organization needs to achieve the challenge. And by challenging people in a respectful way, you respect their ability to do something that they don't know how to do yet.

Love it. Love it. Mark, what's the best advice you've ever received?

Oh, gosh, I've gotten so much, too. I remember it might be from your grandpa as well, you know, that's another great quote. Here's my advice. I'm not using it. I think it is just constantly for me, it's continuous feedback. And the people who respect me and say, you know, we like what you're saying, but the way you're saying it isn't working for us.

Can you give an example?

I'll get on a wind. I'll get locked in like anybody else can. And sometimes I don't have a specific example, I guess, but it's a. It's really just constant interaction, you know, and it's back to respect. So I don't have a specific example that pops into my head right now. Yeah.

Now, you've never been guilty of getting fired up and pulling at your keyboard, have you? And writing a blog article?

Yeah. Yeah. There's a few in there that says, hey, you know, this is for you.

I think we've all done that. Easy to hide behind a keyboard, isn't it?

All right.

We've all done that. All right. Mark, do you have a personal productivity habit that others might benefit from?

Oh, gosh. Since I am not particularly personally productive.

At least you're honest, right?

Yeah, that's. So I think it's just staying. Yeah, it is. I work best when I'm interacting with somebody else. Now, that's just my style. If I'm on my phone by myself, it can be tough. So what I try to do is I like sounding boards and people who I can bounce ideas off of. So that's my Personal productivity.

Yeah. Collaborate.

Yeah, yeah, Collaboration.

Good. So is there over the last year, if you think about your consulting practice and any other interaction you've had with other lean thinkers, has there been something that surprised you?

I'm always surprised. I think, when in a pleasant way that. That. That idea or that feeling when somebody gets it. And. And what surprises me sometimes is when it's the person who we would have in the past branded as a cement head because they're the ones who. When they do, when. When it. When it snaps into place, it's really cool to see.

Yeah.

And so I look for that. I like it. And I never know where it's going to come from.

Yeah, yeah. No, you know, I always tell the true story, and unfortunately, it's a Kaizen event story. So there you go, you know, another Kaizen event. But I do remember coming in one day and there was a gentleman, he was sitting in the back row, you know. You know the one.

Oh, yeah.

Arms crossed, bad look on his face, and was not happy to be there. Been an operator for 30 some years at this company and knew everything. Right. About the business, if you will, running, and it could run anything out there on the shop. But it was not down with that whole event. Well, you know, as I'm sure you've done over the years, we just included that guy and kept kind of pushing him and he eventually got engaged and we were like, well, what do you think? And he was like, well, yeah, this is what you need to do. Okay, well, let's do that. And next thing you know, this guy's totally bought in. And in. True story. At the end of the week, the report out, he literally wept, this guy. And he said that, you know, no one in 30 years has ever asked me for my feedback and input like you guys asked me this week. And by you guys, it was his colleagues and you know me as a facilitator, and that's pretty special. You know, that's beyond lean. That's. That's humans.

You know, I've had similar experiences. I had a team leader said, I've been doing this job for 12 years and I finally know what I did is.

Yeah.

And that was. We had just introduced the kata to them.

Yeah. Fantastic. Now, I'm curious if you ever have a situation where you need to kind of personally recharge or maybe you need to refocus, things aren't going well. Do you have a routine or ritual that you follow?

Just get away from the people and sit in a quiet place for a few Minutes. I'm a spike the scales introvert. So that has to come sometimes.

Yeah.

And that just lets me replay and think about. Okay, I'm going to go back in now. What am I going to do to change the dynamic here?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Time away. Back to the emails. I have my own rule. I. If I ever write an email when I'm mad, I'll write it, but then I save it and draft, come back a couple hours later and almost never send it. Right. Or radically change it.

So my trick there is I don't put who I'm writing it to in there, so I don't send it by accident.

Exactly.

I did that once, too. I ended up sending it to the wrong person, and that wasn't good.

Oh, boy.

Oh, boy. All right.

So, Mark, I know you're extremely knowledgeable guy and you've been doing this stuff for many years, but I'm curious, is there an area or a knowledge area or skill area that you feel you need to improve in order to be a more successful lean thinker?

Well, it's interesting because my bookshelf, the books I'm accumulating at the moment, are on psychology and just learning how these strange things called human beings are actually wired, what drives us one way or another, and recognizing it's not personal, it's biochemistry. And once we understand that, we can let go of a lot of the animosity.

Yes, yes. Now talk a little bit about what are you reading? Because we were also getting the academy. We just covered everything from dopamine and serotonin in your brains and all the rest of it is that kind of stuff.

It is exactly that kind of stuff. In fact, I use it when I'm teaching now because, of course, kata has a lot to do with that, too. But it's fun because I will say, okay, well, I'll play this little trick on him and then I'll explain in the class. Okay. Here. What was going on in your brain chemistry while I rewired it? And once people become conscious of how they've learned over the years, then it kind of makes sense that there is no way that I can give you a pill and you get it. You have to struggle with it. It's no different than learning to drive.

Yes. What's one of those books that you're reading?

Oh, gosh, I'd have to look around. It's just my chair moving. That's fine. The Synaptic Self Getting Things Done. So just a lot of flow, binding flow, blind spots. So most of the popular press on the subject, plus I've picked up a couple of heavy duty textbooks wading through as well. So this is something I'm interested in. So I'm going to get obsessive about it.

Yeah, yeah. Back in, what was it? Episode, let me see, 48, we interviewed Mark Jabin. Not Graben Jabin. And he's a, He's a medical doctor and it was all about the brain and it was fantastic.

Yeah. Correspond with him.

Yeah. Really interesting stuff and how it, how it plays right in with what we're. We're trying to do as continuous improvement practitioners. All right, well, Mark, thank you so much for taking time to visit with us today. Why don't you, let's wrap this show up with you sharing some final words of wisdom and then once you tell people how they can connect with you over social media, your website and so forth.

Sure. Final words of wisdom. Keep trying. And I think that's. I heard something at the. I was at the KATA conference a couple of weeks ago, and it was a great quote from somebody sensei. And, you know, every day a little up, some days a big up. Always do your best to see the next step. You must take the first step. And so sometimes you don't know what to do. So take a step.

You're full of quotes.

Look at that. Yeah. When they come. Yeah.

Fantastic. All right. And how can people connect with you, Mark?

Markleanthinker.com will always work.

Okay.

And there's also a contact mark on the, on the blog over on the right sidebar somewhere.

Are you a tweeter or LinkedIn?

No, I'm not. I'm on LinkedIn. And I guess I was the first Mark Rosenthal because there's no numbers or anything.

Oh, wow.

Okay. So I'm pretty easy to find on LinkedIn.

All right, very nice.

If you type my name in Lean, you'll get about a bazillion hits, too. Follow any of those.

Absolutely. All right, Mark, well, thanks again. And next time I'm out in the Seattle area, we'll look you up and we'll go grab a beer or something.

Okay, thank you very much.

All right, take care.

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